Wednesday, 11 December 2013

Sarah Kelly is a British born artist and writer currently working with hand made paper and text sculpture. She has published two chapbooks with Knives Forks and Spoons Press and been included in several anthologies of contemporary British poets, alongside many other magazines and journals. Her artwork has been exhibited in Argentina and London, most recently at the Southbank Poetry Library as part of the exhibition 'Visual Poetics'. She can be contacted via www.s-kelly.co.uk

Wednesday, 4 December 2013

"MacGillivray is a Scottish writer and artist. Her poetry inhabits a rich artistic universe encompassing performance art, song-writing and the use of visual media such as sculpture and photography. Her multi-disciplinary practice gives her words an imaginative scope which few young poets in the UK can rival.

MacGillivray's work summons forth a pantheon of muses, outlaws and showmen from the dark corners of Scottish and American history, animating their world with an incantatory free verse that is shockingly contemporary and hauntingly ritualistic. The poems excavate passion and transgression with precision and sympathy, allowing the reader to witness history from surprising new angles.

Under her birth name Kirsten Norrie, she has a Doctorate in Performance and Scottish Identity, for which she studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford University. Her thesis is titled Cloth, Cull and Cocktail; Anatomising the Performer Body of 'Scotland'. The wealth of academic research she undertook as part of this finds further expression in her debut collection, The Last Wolf of Scotland. This work treads a fine line between surreal reality and imaginative abstraction, in order to trace the violence through which national mythologies are forged and perpetuated, from the wilderness of the Scottish Highlands to the piratical showmanship of the wild west.

Her poetry has been published in ASLS New Scottish Writing and Magma; her art criticism in Performance Research and several editions of Art Monthly. She has performed alongside writers such as Alan Moore, Don Paterson, Brian Catling and Iain Sinclair."